In order to talk about my Home Lab it is important to tell the origin story and path I took to get here. Or, just skip part 1 and go to part 2! This is home lab origins.

In the Beginning…

Going back as far as 1995 I have had some sort of network in my home. I shared an ISDN connection with two roommates using a Farrallon Netopia ISDN Router and 10Base2 (Thinnet or coax as we called it) networking. It worked well for awhile but after many sessions of troubleshooting cables, terminators, and T-Connectors we upped our game and bought a hub and ethernet cards.

Having ISDN, Cable, DSL, and now Fiber connected with a router and switches carries on to this day. Add in some wi-fi and we’re not really talking about anything special. Just about anyone on-line these days is going to have this configuration in their home.

In 1999 I started a new job as a Server Coordinator at a bio technology company. I was disappointed that my title wasn’t Server Administrator or Network Administrator but what are you going to do? In this role I took care of servers, networking, phones, desktops, printers, scanners, and all the software in between. The achievement I was most proud of was setting up a T1 and brand new Cisco 2500s (probably 2501) with RIP running between two sites. As you can see from the following pictures, the bar was pretty low. Yes, these are photos of my server room.

Around 2002 I had left that job and moved on to a State job where I was the Desktop Team Lead. My focus was building Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Ghost images, evaluating software, and writing install procedures.

I was having a good time and I was good at what I was doing but I wanted to work on servers. I had a bit of server experience from the previous job and I was also enrolled in a technical college where I was taking IT related classes.

Server Tinkering at Home

The prevalent server job at that time (from my observation) was a Windows Server administrator. Novell was still around but dying, Unix was rare, and Linux wasn’t being seriously considered at the organizations I was looking at. So, I took an old desktop computer and installed Windows 2000 Server.

I did all the Windows server things that one should do such as promoting it to a Domain Controller, setting it up as a print server and creating users. I even joined all the computers in my house to the domain. This was my first Home Lab.

Next up I installed Red Hat Linux on another old computer. I don’t remember why I installed that Linux server. Most likely I wanted experience installing it and experience tinkering at the command line. I am sure that I set it up as a SSH server and likely as an Apache server that probably served up a lame webpage. Security professionals may wince, but I definitely opened RDP, SSH, and HTTP to their respective servers. Later I would learn how to tunnel through SSH but in the bad old days of 2002-2007 I just opened stuff up directly. I don’t believe that my Windows server was ever compromised but who knows…

Managing a Windows Server and domain got old after awhile so I eventually took all of that apart. From there I always maintained a Linux server of some sort. The Linux server would have been for SSH, experimentation with Drupal and WordPress, Samba, and tunneling to get access to everything in my home.

Adventures in Media Servers

Around 2008 I bought a Popcorn Hour A110 and started down the path of building various media tanks. One solution was a large USB hard drive attached to whatever router I had at the time. Another solution I had was to put a large hard drive in the Popcorn Hour and move media to it. My recollection of the Popcorn Hour was that, when it worked, it worked well. There were some codec types that it had issues with, the UI was less than stellar, and it was slow. I remember “upgrading” the Popcorn Hour to an HP Laptop which I install Windows XP Media Center Edition on. When I wanted to play a movie I put the laptop on it’s docking station and plugged in the digital audio cable. The laptop could even be controlled by my universal remote control!

I switched over to XBMC and I know that a lot of people loved XBMC but I hated it. I’m sure I was “doing it wrong” but I could never get 100% of my media scanned or the metadata downloaded and I was not a fan of the UI. What I did like was Boxee (which I know was fork of XBMC). I installed that on some hardware about 6 months before they pulled the free version and went all in on the Boxee Box. Eventually I landed on Plex.

Modernizing My Game

Ok, so what does all that talk of media servers have to do with a Home Lab? As I said I started with an external USB disk attached to a router. Then I moved that to a local disk on the Popcorn Hour. Eventually I added more disks to Linux server and used it as a makeshift NAS (no RAID though). As my media grew and the services I wanted to use to maintain that media also grew so did my “server” and my storage. Eventually I would install FreeNAS on an old Athlon system. FreeNAS on that little Athlon which probably only had 8GB of RAM was woefully underpowered. The experience I had on it was a nightmare. However, this gave me my first taste of FreeBSD jails which it leant itself well to better understanding container concepts.

Anyway, the experience was so terrible that I wiped FreeNAS off the system and installed some version of Ubuntu. The data on the FreeNAS ZFS pools was mostly disposable but would have been time consuming to recreate so I was delighted when I learned that I could mount ZFS on Ubuntu. So, out of laziness I ran Ubuntu with two large ZFS pools that had all my data on them. Recently (as in earlier in 2022) I did actual research and purchased equipment specifically for a TrueNAS (renamed from FreeNAS) build. Despite missing that the NIC was not entirely supported (damn you Realtek!), the build came out great and has been very performant. However… will I keep it running? Stay tuned.

So, that takes care of the back story. Now on to what I’m doing next.